Our Blog.

News, views, tips & more.

5 ways to build your website better than your competitors

In business, the number one goal is to achieve success and reach your goals - that’s why we all wake up everyday and work our socks off. It’s all well and good working this hard, but we all need some support from time to time. A website is the perfect platform to help achieve success, after all it’s very unlikely that a successful business is without a brilliant website!

This brings me to our top ‘5 ways to build your website better than your competitors’.

1. Introduce videos & photography.

A video is the perfect way to make your website stand out from the crowd! It brings an instant level of engagement that draws the viewer in and keeps them interested in your service or product/s. Of course this video should actually be related to your business and not just a funny cat video. A quick introduction into your business will help you connect with your audience, giving them a sense of trust.

Good quality photography can also go a long way in the build of a website. It’s an easy solution to resort to stock imagery, but these images never have the same effect a natural and professional photo has on your website.

2. Take a unique approach.

Create unique and easy to digest website content. The optimum level of content per page is between 700 and 800 words - so make every word count!

It’s important to remember to keep your content informative, but interesting to read at the same time. This can be challenging, but the rewards are worth it as this can improve expected viewership and engagement on your website.

3. Mobile optimisation.

As we’re all aware, smartphones are becoming increasingly popular when searching the web. They’re easy to use, fast and convenient - especially with the new voice activated searches. Nifty right?! Over the passed few years, mobile and tablet searching has overtaken the standard desktop searches with a staggering 55% of all searches being carried out on mobile devices. It's never been so important to make sure your website is prepared and optimised for mobile traffic. It may seem impossible to get all that information you carefully created shown on such a small device, but it can be done, and it can look incredible!

4. Clear & concise navigation.

Navigation may seem obvious and easy to master on a website, but there is an art to getting it right. Your website navigation needs to make sense and allow the visitor to quickly find what they’re looking for, the last thing you want is the viewer getting lost and leaving your website!

Clear and concise navigation can also benefit SEO. A clear website structure can help spiders crawl your website, helping to put your website ahead of the game!

5. Optimise your code for speed!

Often a site may look the part, with it’s flashy gizmos and transitions, but the code behind the scenes may be a mess. You may be thinking, well that doesn’t matter, visitors don’t see that? Believe it or not, search engines look at code quality and will penalise any site with messy and unnecessary code. It’s like having a pet dog - it may look cute and fluffy on the outside, but it could actually be crazy and out of control! Poor quality coding will also slow your website down. Nowadays page speed is very important, so making sure your site loads within seconds is key to success.

A few top tips to making your code shine -

Minify CSS, HTML & JS

Avoid duplicate code

Use caching tools

Compress your files

Compress your images

Master the above and you’re on your way to having a fast, trustworthy and attractive looking website. Which is more than one step ahead of your competitors!